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What is This?
Derek Gregory
Abstract
The proponents of late modern war like to argue that it has become surgical,
sensitive and scrupulous, and remotely operated Unmanned Aerial V ehicles
or ‘drones’ have become diagnostic instruments in contemporary debates
over the con junction of virtual and ‘virtuous’ war. Advocates for the use of
Predators and Reapers in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns
have emphasized their crucial role in providing intelligence, reconnaissance
and surveillance, in strengthening the legal armature of targeting, and in
conducting precision-strikes. Critics claim that their use reduces late modern
war to a video game in which killing becomes casual. Most discussion has
focused on the covert campaign waged by CIA-operated drones in Pakistan,
but it is also vitally important to interrogate the role of United States Air
Force-operated drones in Afghanistan. In doing so, it becomes possible to see
that the problem there may not be remoteness and detachment but, rather,
the sense of proximity to ground troops inculcated by the video feeds from
the aerial platforms.
Key words
armed conflict j killing j military j scopic regimes j virtuality j war
Virtuous War
A
DVANCED MILITARIES like to boast that their conduct of war has
become surgical, sensitive and scrupulous (Gregory, 2010a). The
development of a precision-strike capability, the cultural turn
towards a counterinsurgency that places the local population at the centre
of its operations, and the refinement of the legal armature that regulates
armed conflict have all contributed to the celebration of what Der Derian
(2009) calls ‘virtuous war’. At its heart, he argues,
j Theory, Culture & Society 2011 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 28(7- 8): 188^215
DOI: 10.1177/0263276411423027
And at the heart of the ascent of war from the virtual to the virtuous
are the drone wars being waged by the USA in the global borderlands.1
Two qualifications are immediately necessary. First, remotely piloted
aircraft have been used since the First World War, assault drones were
deployed in the closing stages of the Second World War, and the first
major combat use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) was during the
Vietnam War, so there is a considerable history behind today’s remote oper-
ations in the borderlands. There it intersects with the exercise of a pro-
foundly colonial modality of air power. The British invented aerial
counterinsurgency on the North West Frontier with Afghanistan and in
Iraq (Mesopotamia) in the 1920s (Omissi, 1990; Satia, 2008, 2009), and for
all the technical advances there are numerous dispiriting parallels between
then and now. Perhaps the most telling is the repeated insistence that air
attacks are counterproductive. Two commentators closely identified with
the new US counterinsurgency doctrine insist that ‘expanding or even con-
tinuing the drone war [in Pakistan] would be a mistake’. They explain:
Colonel F.S. Keen said much the same of the bombing of Pashtun vil-
lages on the North West Frontier in 1923: ‘By driving the inhabitants of
the bombarded area from their homes in a state of exasperation, dispersing
them among neighbouring clans and tribes with hatred in their hearts at
what they consider ‘‘unfair’’ methods of warfare’, he wrote, these attacks
‘bring about the exact political results which it is so important in our own
interests to avoid, viz., the permanent embitterment and alienation of the
frontier tribes’ (Keen, 1923: 400; see also Roe, 2008).
As my parallel suggests ^ and this is the second qualification ^ the
modern debate has focused on the covert war waged by CIA-operated
drones in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. The cam-
paign was initiated by President George W. Bush in 2004, and by the end
of 2008 there had been 46 strikes directed at killing so-called ‘High Value
Targets’. The attacks were ramped up by Obama, and by the end of 2010
there had been another 170 strikes.2 These operations raise complex and
troubling legal questions, not least because the United States is not at war
with Pakistan. On one side are those who defend the strikes as limited and
legitimate acts of self-defense against attacks from the Taliban who seek
sanctuary across the border and also as an effective counterterrorism tactic
against al-Qaeda. Indeed, Anderson describes ‘perfect war’, the very
summit of ‘virtuous war’, as ‘target selection perfected to the point of assas-
sination’, a doctrine for which drones have become the weapon of choice
(‘the only game in town’, according to the Director of the CIA) (see, for
example, Anderson, 2009; Paust, 2009). On the other side are critics who
insist that such targeting, however ‘precise’, amounts to extra-judicial kill-
ing, and that if civilian agencies like the CIA conduct military operations
then their agents become unlawful combatants. Their objections also fasten
on the spatiality of the war zone: they draw special attention to the imprecise
legal delineation of the ‘global battlespace’ invoked by the United States
and to the lack of accountability for civilian casualties (see, for example,
O’Connell, 2009; Rogers, 2010; Solis, 2010). But for the most part all these
arguments assume that the use of UAVs by the United States Air Force
(USAF) and its military allies in Afghanistan ^ including Britain and
Canada ^ is unproblematic, and in doing so they reinforce the claim that
these new technologies enable advanced militaries to conduct ‘virtuous
war’. This article seeks to interrogate those assumptions, but I have to note
that it is not easy to disentangle one campaign from the other. Some com-
mentators have suggested that the USAF is involved to varying degrees in
the CIA strikes, but in any case the Air Force uses the Pentagon’s Joint
Integrated Prioritized Target List to conduct its own strikes on leaders of
the Taliban and others who may have only a proximate relation to the war
in Afghanistan, and makes no secret of the fact that a prime function of
its Predators and Reapers is to ‘put warheads on foreheads’ (Mulrine, 2008)
(Figure 1).3
I cannot adjudicate these questions here, and my own focus is on the
‘scopic regime’ through which drone operations take place. Metz (1982: 61)
proposed the term to distinguish the cinematic from the theatrical way of
staging and seeing the world, but it has since been uncoupled from any spe-
cific forms, displays and technologies to denote a mode of visual apprehen-
sion that is culturally constructed and prescriptive, socially structured and
shared (see also Jay, 1988; Somaini, 2005^6). Like its companion term
‘visuality’, meaning culturally or techno-culturally mediated ways of
seeing, the concept is intended as a critical supplement to the idea of
vision as a purely biological capacity (I say ‘supplement’ because the
embodiment of vision remains of more than incidental importance). Scopic
regimes are historically variable, and different regimes can coexist within
a single cultural and social formation, but the closest attention has been
paid to the ligatures between visuality and modernity. Apart from a handful
of studies, however, of which Virilio’s War and Cinema (1989) is probably
the best known, little systematic attention has been given to the ways in
which the conduct of modern wars is mediated by scopic regimes. Here too
the air wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan may converge; so too do the lines
of defence and attack. Those who defend the drone wars insist that the
near real-time video-feeds from the aircraft allow an unprecedented degree
of precision and a carefully calibrated response that can minimize civilian
casualties. Those who criticize these operations are concerned that killing
at such a distance becomes too casual and that late modern war has been
reduced to a video game. This too has a history, of course, and Chow
(2006: 35) argues that:
War can no longer be fought without the skills of playing video games. In
the aerial bombings of Iraq the world was divided into an above and a
below in accordance with the privilege of access to the virtual world. Up
above in the sky, war was a matter of maneuvers across the video screen by
US soldiers who had been accustomed as teenagers to playing video games
at home; down below, war remained tied to the body, to manual labor, to
the random disasters falling from the heavens.
most of their missions are controlled via Ku-band satellite link by operators
in a Ground Control Station at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada
(Figure 2).4 When Kaplan (2006: 81) visited the base, he was told: ‘Inside
that trailer is Iraq, inside the other, Afghanistan.’ The effortless sense of
time-space compression is exceeded only by its casual imperialism. ‘Inside
those trailers’, Kaplan explained, ‘you leave North America, which falls
under Northern Command, and enter the Middle East, the domain of
Central Command [CENTCOM]. So much for the tyranny of geography.’
But critics insist that this replaces one tyranny of geography with another.
The death of distance enables death from a distance, and these remotely
piloted missions not only project power without vulnerability ^ as the Air
Force frequently asserts ^ but also seemingly without compunction
(Royakkers and Van Est, 2010; Webb et al., 2010). Distance lends re-
enchantment, you might say. Some see this as appallingly mundane ^ dis-
paraging the pilots as ‘cubicle warriors’ or ‘commuter fighters’ ^ but others,
I think more perceptively, sense a terrifying Olympian power released
through the UAV’s Hellfire missiles. ‘Sometimes I felt like a God hurling
thunderbolts from afar’, one pilot admits (Martin, 2010: 3), and Engelhardt
(2009) spells out the metaphor’s implications: ‘Those about whom we
make life-or-death decisions, as they scurry below or carry on as best they
can, have ^ like any beings faced with the gods ^ no recourse or appeal.’
As the Predators and Reapers flown by the USAF have become more
closely integrated into counterinsurgency, however, this picture has become
more complicated. In what follows I focus on their hunter-killer role,
intelligence).9 When the staff at the CAOC are added to the list, a remark-
able number of people are able to be in direct or indirect contact by voice,
video or internet relay chat (mIRC) as each mission progresses.
This network performs a number of vital tasks. First, archived images
are scanned to filter out ‘uneventful footage’ and distinguish ‘normal activity
from abnormal activity’. Ideally this forensic monitoring ^ which is a sort
of militarized rhythmanalysis, even a weaponized time-geography10 ^
would be based on cultural knowledge, but the image bank is so vast that
experiments are under way with automated software systems for ‘truthing’
and annotating video imagery, and new TV technologies are being explored
to tag and retrieve images (Barnes, 2010; Biltgen and Tomes, 2010; Jean,
2011; Lake, 2010; Shanker and Richtel, 2011).11 Second, commanders, advi-
sers and analysts scan live video streams in order to push time-critical infor-
mation to UAV crews and ground forces responding to emergent events.
These developments reinforce the rush to the intimate that characterizes
counterinsurgency operations, but in this case the emphasis is as much on
‘the rush’ as ‘the intimate’ (Gregory, 2008). The hierarchies of the network
are flat and fluid, its spaces complex and compound, and the missions are
executed onscreen through video feeds and chat rooms (displays show as
many as 30 different chats at a time) that bring a series of personnel with
different skills in different locations into the same zone. Time and space
are telescoped so that, as one officer put it, ‘We’re mostly online with each
other as we go’ (Tirpak, 2009; see also Drew, 2010a).
‘scurrying over those they hit too fast to witness the devastation they cause
and the blood they spill’, he insists that all of those watching a UAV mission
in real time ‘see the target up close, [they] see what happens to it during
the explosion and the aftermath. You’re further away physically but you see
more.’ In fact a constant refrain of those working from Nevada is that they
are not further away at all but only ‘eighteen inches from the battlefield’:
the distance between the eye and the screen. This sensation is partly the
product of the deliberate inculcation of a ‘warrior culture’ among UAV
pilots, but it is also partly a product of interpellation, of being drawn into
and captured by the visual field itself.15
Although Grossman was writing before UAVs were armed and so could not
directly address the drone wars, he did point to first-person shooter video
games as particularly powerful agents of conditioning through which players
become ‘hardwired’ for killing, and his anatomy of killing listed not only
physical distance but also emotional distance, including social, cultural,
moral and, crucially, ‘mechanical’ distance: the screen that separates the
gamer from the game (1995: 188^9).16 It seems a small step to infer that
long-distance killing from a UAV would radicalize those affective protec-
tions. Yet video games do not stage violence as passive spectacle; they are
profoundly immersive, drawing players in to their virtual worlds, which is
in part why the US military uses them in its pre-deployment training.17
The video streams from the UAVs seem to produce the same reality-effect.
‘You see a lot of detail,’ the commander of the Air Force’s first dedicated
UAV wing notes, so ‘we feel it, maybe not to the same degree [as] if we
were actually there, but it affects us.’ ‘When you let a missile go,’ he
explains, ‘you know that’s real life ^ there’s no reset button’ (Logan, 2009;
Zucchino, 2010). One Predator pilot insists that the horror of watching two
young boys on a bicycle ride into the frame seconds before his missile
struck its designated target ‘lost none of its impact’ from being viewed on a
screen: ‘Death observed was still death’ (Martin, 2010: 212). Anecdotes
cannot settle the matter, of course, but reports of drone crews suffering
from post-traumatic stress induced by constant exposure to high-resolution
images of real-time killing and the after-action inventory of body parts
should be taken extremely seriously (Lindlaw, 2008).18
There are also salient differences between video games and video
feeds. First, immersion in video games is discontinuous ^ levels are re-
started, situations re-set, games paused ^ and while there are different
intensities of involvement during a UAV mission and shifts change in the
course of a patrol, immersion in the live video feeds is intrinsically continu-
ous.19 ‘The Nintendo mentality is a detached mentality’, a former chief of
staff argued, whereas ‘this stuff is real’ (Cantwell, 2009: 70). Second, video
games staged in simulacra of Afghanistan show stylized landscapes prowled
solely by ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ whose cartoonish appearance makes
them instantly recognizable; the neo-Orientalism of these renditions is a
matter of dismal record (see H˛glund, 2008). But the video feeds from
UAVs reveal a much more complicated, inhabited landscape in which dis-
tinctions between civilians and combatants are intensely problematic. The
existence of so many eyes in that crowded sky ^ commanders, controllers,
analysts and, significantly, military lawyers ^ is a (pre)caution that the pres-
ence of civilians is a constant possibility. The risk of ‘collateral damage’ has
become a vital consideration throughout the kill-chain, driven by both the
protocols of international law and also the prospect of public scrutiny. This
marks a third crucial difference from video games because, as Grossman
(1995: 314^16) acknowledges, killing in combat is regulated by rules and
legal sanctions, and defenders of the drone missions routinely draw attention
to the laws of armed conflict, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and
close air support is provided to ‘troops in contact’ may result not only from
time-critical targeting and its correspondingly ‘fewer checks to determine
if there is a civilian presence’ (Human Rights Watch, 2008: 30) ^ which is
widely acknowledged ^ but also from the persistent presence of the UAV
and its video feeds immersing its remote operators in, and to some substan-
tial degree rendering them responsible for the evolving situation on the
ground.25 This predicament, in which proximity not distance becomes the
problem, cannot be resolved by tinkering with the Rules of Engagement;
high-resolution imagery is not a uniquely technical capacity but part of a
techno-cultural system that renders ‘our’ space familiar even in ‘their’
space ^ which remains obdurately Other.
An example will illustrate what I mean.26 In the early morning of
21 February 2010 a team from US Special Forces was moving in to search
the village of Khud in Oruzgan province in central Afghanistan, which
had been identified as a Taliban stronghold. Before first light an AC-130
gunship spotted three vehicles with what its crew called ‘unlawful personnel’
in the back, moving down a dirt road five miles away. The Joint Terminal
Attack Controller ( JTAC) with the Special Forces detachment confirmed
from intercepted but unidentified radio communications that they were ‘set-
ting themselves up for an attack’, and later, on the same basis, that they
were probably looking at a Taliban force with ‘a high-level Taliban com-
mander’. A Predator was called in to track the vehicles; its crew had inter-
mittent mIRC contact with the gunship until it ran low on fuel and had to
cede ‘the chain of custody’, but because the JTAC had no laptop the
Predator crew only had (sometimes garbled or broken) radio contact with
the Special Forces detachment and could only transmit video to their com-
mand posts. Following standard operating procedure, the image analysts in
the Distributed Common Ground System were linked only to the Predator
crew and had no direct contact with the troops on the ground. The noise in
the network was compounded because video feeds were of variable quality,
and the Predator crew had to rely on infra-red sensors in the half-light
until they could switch to ‘Day TV’; even then the weather intermittently
muddied the image stream. Still, the Predator crew did not hesitate to iden-
tify ‘tactical movement’ and individuals holding ‘cylindrical objects’ that
they believed (in fact ‘hoped’) were rifles. When the sensor operator com-
mented that it was ‘weird how they all have cold spots on their chests’ the
pilot explained that ‘it’s what they’ve been doing here lately, wrapping their
[expletive] up in their man dresses so you can’t [positively identify] it’. In
the absence of a positive identification, the JTAC warned them of the
Rules of Engagement, but the sensor operator insisted that the truck
‘would make a beautiful target’. When an image analyst identified ‘at least
one child’ the pilot objected that he was ‘so quick to call [expletive] kids
but not to call a [expletive] rifle’, and the sensor operator agreed: ‘I really
doubt that children call . . . I really [expletive] hate that.’ They were told to
wait for the ground commander to assess ‘proportionality, distinction’ ^
there is no direct record of any clearance from the CAOC ^ the crew
Cultural Divides
There is a long history of assuming that air war is, by its very nature, virtu-
ous: that attacks from the air can either deter war in the first place or
bring it to a speedy end without the protracted carnage of ground warfare
in the second. This progressivist ideology, with its emphasis on economy
and efficiency ^ ‘beneficial bombing’ as Clodfelter (2010) calls it ^ survived
the horrors of the Second World War more or less intact, and Swift (2010)
has proposed (though in markedly less celebratory terms) that ‘today’s
Predator drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan are the direct descendants of
the Heinkels and Lancaster bombers of the Second World War’. I am not
sure that he is right. There are continuities between the two, at once ideolog-
ical and operational, and many advocates of air power before and after the
Second World War imagined something like today’s drone operations with
uncanny foresight. Celebrating victory over Japan in 1945, for example,
General Henry ‘Hap’Arnold famously noted that: ‘We have just won a war
with a lot of heroes flying around in planes.’ But, he continued, ‘the next
war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all’. There are
other continuities, but there are also significant differences, and the lines
of descent are complex.
For its part, invoking the Revolution in Military Affairs and its succes-
sor projects, the USAF claims that it has moved from ‘industrial age’ to
‘information age’ warfare. Since the Second World War, the number of weap-
ons (aircraft/bombs) involved in attacking a target has substantially
decreased while the number of sensors involved has substantially increased.
Armed UAVs have played a vital role in this transformation, yet if the
USAF sees this as crossing ‘a cultural divide of precision and information’
(Figure 6), critics worry that a different Rubicon has been crossed. Far
from the precision-strike capacity of ‘virtuous war’, Britain’s Air Chief
Marshall Sir Brian Burridge has described the hunter-killer missions as
‘virtue-less war’ involving neither heroism nor courage (Mayer, 2009).
What he has in mind is a central tenet of many ethical claims about
armed combat: that it is only permissible to kill if you run the risk of
being killed yourself. In contrast, remote UAV operations allow what the
USAF calls ‘the projection of power without vulnerability’.30 This is only
true in a particular sense, of course: pilots and operators at Creech Air
Force Base are plainly out of harm’s way, but the forward-deployed operators
and ground crews are not. Still, Burridge’s point goes to the very heart of
late modern war. Indeed, Gros (2010: 268) doubts that it is proper to call it
war at all:
conventional air war ^ the ‘view from above’ and the ‘view from below’ ^ are
fused in the network operations that I have described: as a Mission
Coordinator at Creech put it, ‘You’re watching what they see, eighteen
inches from the battlefield’ (Guernica, 2010). But in this new military
optic, both points of view are always ‘ours’.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Ben Anderson and three anonymous referees for their comments on a first
draft of this article, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for finan-
cial support.
Notes
1. A ‘drone’ is the popular term for the aircraft I discuss here, but the United
States Air Force prefers Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) or Unmanned Aerial
Vehicle (UAV); when these aircraft are part of an integrated network ^ as here ^
this is referred to as an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). To describe them as
‘unmanned’ is misleading, however, because while a UAV does not carry a pilot,
the system is operated and supported by several hundred personnel.
2. Bill Roggio maintains a tally of drone strikes in Pakistan at http://www.long-
warjournal.org/pakistan-strikes.php. Counting the strikes is relatively straightfor-
ward, but estimating casualties is much more contentious.
3. There are many different UAVs operated in Afghanistan by both ground and
air forces; my discussion is confined to US Air Force operations, and I focus on
the MQ-1 (Predator) and the MQ-9 (Reaper), which, unlike smaller UAVs, are
usually armed. The first Predators were developed by General Atomics for the
Pentagon and the CIA between 1994 and 1996, and were deployed to Bosnia in
1995 and Kosovo in 1996. MQ-1A Predators were armed with Hellfire missiles
in early 2001 and rushed to Afghanistan after 9/11. The MQ-9 Reaper came into
service in Afghanistan in September 2007; it can fly higher (50,000/25,000 ft)
and faster (230/84 mph) than the Predator, has a much greater range (3682/454
miles) and carries a much heavier weapon load. The US Army also operates (usu-
ally much smaller) UAVs launched and controlled in-theatre whose primary role
is to provide video feeds to attack helicopters and ground forces.
4. The 7000 mile distance imposes a 1.8 second delay in control inputs that makes
it impossible for remote operators to perform take-offs and landings, which are
the responsibility of forward deployed Launch and Recovery crews that use a
line-of-sight data link.
5. There is a trade-off: Reapers equipped with Gorgon Stare will fly unarmed and
on shorter missions as a result of the increased power demands and drag on the
aircraft imposed by the new sensor pods. This will presumably redouble the sig-
nificance of UAVs hunting in flocks or swarms and being in close contact with
other assets, since targets identified by the Gorgon Stare will have to be attacked
from other platforms.
6. Preliminary tests of Gorgon Stare in October 2010 suggested that the system
was ‘not operationally effective’ (Cloud and Dilanian, 2011; Nakashima, 2011).
The real-time resolution level was too coarse to track ‘dismounts’ (people); image
stitching was so poor that the ability to ‘track targets across the image seams’
was compromised; and software errors made geo-location ‘inaccurate and inconsis-
tent’. These problems were aggravated by a low rate of image transmission to the
ground station that confounded the prosecution of dynamic targets. The USAF dis-
missed the report as preliminary, however, and the system was deployed to
Afghanistan just in time for the Taliban’s spring offensive in April 2011.
7. The phrase was first used in July 2009 by Lt Gen. David Deptula when he was
the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for ISR, and it has since become a leitmotif
in discussions of ISR.
8. The USAF has five DCGS stations, three in the US and two in Germany and
Korea, linked in a system known as Sentinel.
9. A Combat Air Patrol (CAP) involves a 24 -hour presence in a target box or
combat zone, and usually requires three or four aircraft: one on station, one or
two en route and one on the ground. The USAF has increased the number of
daily CAPS flown by Predators and Reapers from just six in 2004 through 12 in
2006 and 34 in 2008 to 53 by 2010, and plans to increase this to 65 by FY 2013
(Black, 2011). As the number of CAPs increases, and the image stream multiplies
even more rapidly, the Air Force will face a serious problem in ‘manning its
unmanned platforms’ unless a significant number of routine operations can be
automated (Schanz, 2011).
10. The details are classified, but the US military is known to use GeoTime, a
program that fuses and visualizes geo-spatial, temporal and intelligence data
from multiple sources (‘combining the where, the when and the who’) as a three-
dimensional array that replicates the standard time-geography diagrams developed
by Swedish geographer Torsten Hgerstrand in the 1960s and 1970s. The program
includes ‘dedicated pattern-finding tools’ that allow users ‘to navigate the data in
real time for rapid visual discovery of patterns of behavior’ (see http://
www.geotime.com).
11. On video analytics and its algorithms, see Crandall (2010: 72^3) (though he
seems to minimize the technical and operational difficulties involved).
12. They are also described as MALE (Mid-Altitude Long-Endurance) drones,
and since the US military is evidently fixated by its acronyms it would not be dif-
ficult to read this as a techno-cultural version of the voyeurism of the Orientalist
gaze in which ‘the Orient’ reclines unsuspecting beneath their persistent, penetrat-
ing stare. Thus, for example, Martin (2010: 81) describes his role as ‘a voyeur in
the sky’ and notes that ‘the poor bastards never once considered looking up, way
up, from which height Predator crews observed their every move’. Hypervisibility
then becomes a climactic voyeurism. Such a reading also draws attention to the
‘techno-masculinization’ that advances the abstract disembodiment of late
modern war (see Masters, 2005).
13. The total number of Close Air Support sorties flown by all types of aircraft
increased from 6495 in 2004 through 20,359 in 2008 to 33,679 in 2010.
14. The term derives from Foucault, but Deleuze’s (1992: 160) gloss is particularly
apposite: dispositifs or apparatuses comprise ‘curves of visibility and curves of
enunciation’, in other words, ‘they are machines which make one see and speak’.
15. That this is a process requires emphasis. One UAV pilot confessed that when
he made his first ‘kill’, he was ‘concentrating entirely on the shot and its technical
aspects’; the man in his sights was ‘only a high-tech image on a computer screen’.
But subsequent missions gradually produced a sense not only of involvement but
also of (conditional) responsibility and even, on occasion, remorse (Martin, 2010:
43^4, 52^5, 212).
16. Cf. O’Connell (2009: 9^10), who claims that the central factors in Grossman’s
study also ‘characterize drone operations’, which in her eyes look ‘very much like
a video game’. In fairness, I should note that some of the sources on which she
relies for her account of the conduct of those (CIA) operations have been overtaken
by events.
17. The military also uses them for recruitment, which is much more problematic,
and on its website the Air Force does stage the hunter-killer missions as video-
game entertainment (see ‘Fly the MQ-9 Reaper’ at http://www.airforce.com/
games-and-extras). More generally, however, late modern war prizes skills like
rapid hand-eye coordination, multi-tasking and visual acuity that are honed by
playing video games ^ to that extent, Chow (2006: 35) is right ^ but this does
not automatically reduce war to a video game.
18. Others may be more blase¤; the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
described jaded analysts watching archived hours of what he (and apparently
they) call ‘Death TV’ (Lake, 2010).
19. I owe this suggestion to Ben Anderson.
20. Military lawyers prefer the term ‘laws of armed conflict’ (LOAC) to the more
usual ‘international humanitarian law’.
21. Beard served as Associate Deputy General Counsel (International Affairs),
Office of the Secretary of Defense, 1990^2004.
22. The ‘mathematical precision’ presumably refers to collateral damage modelling
rather than the legal principles and concepts, since elsewhere the same officer con-
cedes that proportionality is ‘not a mathematical formula or anything like that’
and that the laws of armed conflict contain some ‘very wiggly concept[s]’
(Transcript, Department of Defense Bloggers Roundtable with Col. Gary Brown,
27 May 2009).
23. I have condensed this idealized account from Targeting (USAF, 2006) and Air
Force Operations and the Law ( Judge Advocate General’s School, Maxwell Air
Force Base, 2009: ch. 16). See also Shanker (2008); Mulrine (2008); Kurle
(2010); Bitzes (2011). For a rare description of how the legal process works in prac-
tice, see Hyland (2010).
24. One example: a Predator operated by the CIA killed Baitullah Mehsud, the
leader of the Pakistan Taliban (TTP), on 5 August 2009; but it took 16 strikes
over the preceding 14 months before he was assassinated, in the course of
which 200^320 other people were killed (Mayer, 2009). Visual imagery is clearly
insufficient, and Adair (2010) insists that ‘optimal engagement of UAVs demands
a nuanced understanding of the environment gained only through interaction
with the population on the ground ^ UAV use is not a panacea for face-to-face
interaction.’ Although there are continuing experiments in detecting voice signa-
tures and chemical signatures (emitted by IED factories) from airborne plat-
forms, these are clearly supplements to not substitutes for detailed ‘human
intelligence’.
25. There is only one recorded instance of US troops being killed by ‘friendly fire’
from a UAV to date. On 6 April 2011 Marines under fire in southern
Afghanistan mistook ‘hot spots’ on a video feed from a Predator for Taliban fight-
ers moving toward them and called in a missile strike; in fact they were US
troops moving in to reinforce the Marines, and two of them died from their
wounds (Cloud, 2011b). A Pentagon spokesperson explained that ‘the video feeds
sometimes provide blurry or unclear images of conditions on the ground,
making it hard for screeners responsible for searching the video for possible tar-
gets to always understand what they are seeing’ (MacAskill, 2011).
26. This account is derived from the official transcript of radio transmissions,
chat log and intercom conversations obtained by the Los Angeles Times under a
Freedom of Information request. The transcript is redacted, and does not include
communications with the CAOC, or any video footage (see Cloud, 2011a).
27. I have in mind the video footage showing the crew of an Apache helicopter
gunning down civilians in Baghdad in July 2007 (see http://www.
collateralmurder.com).
28. This is an astonishing essay and I don’t have space to do it justice, but there is
one claim that bears directly on the present discussion. Etzioni claims that criti-
cisms are ‘written by people who yearn for a nice clean war, one in which only
bad people will be killed using ‘‘surgical’’ strikes that inflict no collateral damage’
(2010: 71) This is an extraordinary inversion, since it is proponents of UAVs that
consistently connect them to a surgical-strike capacity.
29. Mitchell (2011: 53) notes that the origins of ‘immunity’ lie in politico-legal not
bio-medical discourse; but he suggests treating counterterrorism as ‘a public
health crisis rather than a war’ and calls for a ‘strengthening of the immune
system’ ^ seemingly unaware of the biopolitical integuments of late modern war.
30. The UAVs themselves are highly vulnerable; in Afghanistan (and elsewhere)
they fly in uncontested airspace, but in other war zones in their present form
their operational life would be much shorter.
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